Using process mining in software development process management: A case study

In this paper we describe the application of process mining techniques to analyze a software development process. Software engineering practitioners often conduct quality auditing of the development process to assure conformance with organizational standards. Despite some works have explored process mining techniques for the conformance analysis of general business processes, it is not of our knowledge any study that applies process mining to conformance checking of software development processes. Under a practical perspective, this paper explores a real database with event logs generated in the past five years of execution of a software development process. The database was gently provided by a Brazilian software house with annual revenue of more than US$ 500 million and includes more than 2,000 cases (process instances). The results show that process mining can be effectively employed as a supporting tool for the management of software development processes and for the improvement of the maturity level of software engineering organizations.